With so much awareness now of environmental issues here are our favorite green children’s books…

1. The Lorax (Dr. Seuss)

The original and the best children’s book about the perils of destroying your environment with greed and selfishness. “UNLESS someone like you…cares a whole awful lot…nothing is going to get better…It’s not.” Of course this picture book is typical Dr Seuss with wild tongue twisting rhymes and technicolour illustrations that almost require sunglasses to look at but it is also probably Seuss’ most important and prophetic work. The Once-ler describes how he has decimated the Loraxs’ habitat with deforestation and air and water pollution to set up his manufacturing plants, leading to the poor Loraxs’ extinction. Check out the Lorax Earth Day website- help the real Lorax forests.

2. Weslandia (Paul Fleischman and Kevin Hawkes)

This beautiful picture book is so very important in many ways. Protagonist Wesley is bullied at school because he doesn’t conform to what his peers consider normal, for example he doesn’t like pizza! While he is on school holidays and with no friends to play with he decides to create himself a self sustainable civilisation. He uses a plot of earth and grows a crop of ’swist’ a plant of his own creation that takes off soon towering above him and and bearing bizarre looking fruit. Soon Wesley discovers that he can use his strange crop as a multitude of things including clothing and shelter thus creating his ‘Weslandia’. Kevin Hawkes beautifully illustrates Wesley’s utopia giving little children a lavish landscape to admire while older children will grasp the themes of environment and social conscience.

3. We are the Weather Makers : The story of Global Warming (Tim Flannery)

This revised and updated version of Australian Tim Flannery’s best selling book on climate change is for a young adult audience, the children who it seems will inherit all these environmental issues from previous generations. This is science without all the jargon, in depth Flannery explains all the problems regarding the climate and also explores the solutions but all in a way that is easy to digest and understand. It is broken into chapters on each issue and has been printed in an excellent easy to read type. Marketed for an audience of 9 to 90 this is a great introduction to the world we live in today.

4. Scarlette Beane (Karen Wallace and Jon Berkeley)

The acrylic illustrations in this picture book are just so gorgeous. Scarlette is adorable with her face as red as a beet and little green fingers. On her fifth birthday she receives a small garden all of her own and begins to plant. Her vegies grow and grow until her whole neighborhood is enjoying the spoils. This is a beautiful sweet tale of ecology, friendship and sharing good food. Children love identifying objects and in this picture book there are plenty of vegetables to point at and name as well as showing them how plants grow.

5. Uno’s Garden (Graeme Base)

And of course funny little Uno! Winner of the The Wilderness Society Picture Book of the Year 2007, they described Uno’s Garden like this “Uno’s Garden is a lively and lavishly detailed picture book about environmental sustainability. A whimsical imaginary landscape demonstrates the importance of learning from past mistakes to ensure a balanced and liveable future“. See Katie’s fab post here about the Uno’s Garden Myer windows last Christmas.

And mummy is reading this!

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, it’s a fascinating imagining of what would happen to the planet if humans disappeared.

I came across this beautiful new book the other day, by Helen Ward and Marc Craste. This book is one that straddles the border between picture book and graphic novel, and is no doubt intended for an older audience than the traditional picture book.(This genre is also being explored with great success by Australian author and illustrator, Shaun Tan, whose book The Arrival has won a host of awards here and overseas.)

The illustrations in Varmints are incredibly evocative, and have been done by film-maker Marc Craste, whose debut short film, Jo Jo in the Stars won the 2004 BAFTA Best Animated Short Film. Marc lends Varmints a wonderfully cinematic feel: the use of tracing paper and even the elements of gloss on the cover give it a feeling of movement, and there is an amazing sense of filmic perspective on the angles taken in the illos.

The text is lyrical and poignant, and works perfectly alongside the images.

Varmints tackles the theme of environmental degradation, and it reminds me a bit of both Dr Seuss’s The Lorax (the ultimate greenie book for kids written long before eco-matters were a daily news item) and Graeme Base’s Uno’s Garden (reviewed by me here).

This is a beautiful book for collectors, and I couldn’t resist it. (I had in mind that I might give it to someone, but by the time I got it home, couldn’t imagine who it would suit better than, well, me!)